Between Oz's reassurances and the look on his face--jaw clenched, skin stretched tight around his mouth, eyes that dart to meet Giles' and then quickly away--Giles isn't at all sure he wants whatever it was that Oz handed him and then snatched back
( ... )
"Course I did," Oz says. He sits carefully next to Giles, close enough to reach if Giles wants to, but not clinging like the ivy he wants to be. The book's been molded to his pocket and the inside of his knapsack for so long that it looks strange out here in the clean, well-lit room, cradled in Giles' wide palms. The book is small and dirty.
Just like him.
"I, um. It's got stuff in it. I filled it up, took it with me. And I thought, like -" He looks down at his own hands, tiny, the nails gnawed down, and breathes.
He looks up so quickly that Giles half-flinches and blinks rapidly.
"Know you're wondering where I went. Why. So I wanted you to look at it."
Like being flayed open on an operating table, naked and swabbed with blood-yellow antiseptic and everyone watching, poking, laughing.
Decades ago, not long after Giles started primary school, his father showed him how to use the encyclopedia. The volumes were too big for him, and the desk in his father's library too high, so he sat on his father's knee and looked at the massive pages with their columns of small type and their black-and-white photographs. "Any questions you can think of, this will answer," Dad said. And of course he thought of question after question, less for the information than for the privilege of sitting there proudly while the tobacco-scented wool of his father's jacket prickled his skin every time he moved
( ... )
His knee pops when Oz stands and slides onto Giles' lap, and it feels like it takes too long to settle, but then his back is against the arm of the couch and his head is on Giles' shoulder and the position, at least, is familiar. Comfort will follow, soon as he can breathe right and manage to open his eyes.
His mom's older sister used to go to consciousness-raising groups when his mom was a teenager, and they'd do things like look at their own genitals in the mirror to get a feel for their womanhood. Oz doesn't want to look at himself like that, doesn't want to revisit the pages he made; he's read the pages Giles wrote over and over, so he's memorized the sequence, starts hearing Auden as he finishes the excerpt from Midsummer-Night's Dream. But he skips past his own pages, every time
( ... )
"That wouldn't have helped." Giles' fingers have clenched around Oz's arm, and it takes effort to loosen them, to touch Oz gently. "Nothing helped. I didn't feel better when you left Sunnydale. It was just a different kind of knife in my gut
( ... )
Giles embraces him like someone drowning, pulling Oz down and down, the questions just more currents and weight.
Questions ought to be life-lines, the rope tossed at the last minute, hauling you to safety. They never have been, not for Oz. Giles asked him once before if Oz loved Willow. Love a lot of people, he said; still in love with you, he didn't manage to get out. Questions wrap around his throat and clog his mouth
( ... )
Now that he's had honesty, Giles could almost beg for lies. You never loved her, tell me you didn't, tell me there was only me. Oz is watching him, worry and sadness furrowing his face until he looks twice his age, so transparently pale that Giles imagines if he looked closely he could see all the way to the skull
( ... )
You're here. Here, not there, and it's promise and threat all at once.
Oz can't see anything beyond the seam of Giles' sweater and a patch of skin on his throat, but he is still here, one little room that feels just the same as the one in Sunnydale, and it's an everywhere.
"Love you," Oz says softly. Everywhere is a place, worlds-big, that jolts and rumbles, like Giles' irregular breath and the grinding sound of his voice.
"Of course it matters. Hurt you so much." Oz digs his hand between Giles' side and the cushion, working and weaselling it deeper until his arm is wrapped as tightly around Giles as Giles' arms are around him. He tried so hard to be normal and human and right, and all he succeeded in doing was killing Veruca and nearly killing Giles and breaking Willow. He's nowhere now, broken and scattered, and he clenches his fist around a fold in the sweater.
"Want to stay -" Oz wriggles back a little, trying to see Giles' face. Brine drying to rocky salt on the back of his tongue and winds whipping through his chest. "Can't
Somewhere behind him, the book hits the floor with a dull thud, but Oz doesn't move. He tightens his hold on Giles, tries to press even closer, through wool and skin and bone, and kisses the slight hollow of Giles' temple more times than he count
( ... )
"It was waiting," Giles says, spreading his fingers a little wider over Oz's skin to feel the warmth, the movement and life. He wrapped love up in tissue paper and packed it away, packed most of himself away, in a dark box. Unused and half-forgotten, and he's lucky the moths didn't get in and chew it to fragments
( ... )
Oz wants to have seven conversations at once - he wants to know why Giles loves him, how he managed to do it, and he wants to talk about Esquel and the Welsh black cake and Lilin's bossiness and Padre Jorge's sad eyes and the constant, dry cold, and he wants to sink silently against Giles and talk with his fingertips on the center of Giles' palm, and he wants more, so much - and this hunger for talk is more astonishing, even, than the fact that Giles was here, that love was still waiting, dormant, somewhere inside them both
( ... )
Giles looks down at Oz's face, which is stripped of familiarity at this peculiar angle, broken down into its basic geometries, like a study for a Cubist painting. All the details-the width of Oz's mouth, the sharp slope of his jaw, the muted oceanic colors that make his eyes look vague and dreamy even when he's concentrating-stand out, and Giles wishes again, as he has intermittently since he was a boy, that he could draw. It would be a way to know Oz better, to concretize and formalize that knowledge, the way the book translates time and memory into things that can be seen
( ... )
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Just like him.
"I, um. It's got stuff in it. I filled it up, took it with me. And I thought, like -" He looks down at his own hands, tiny, the nails gnawed down, and breathes.
He looks up so quickly that Giles half-flinches and blinks rapidly.
"Know you're wondering where I went. Why. So I wanted you to look at it."
Like being flayed open on an operating table, naked and swabbed with blood-yellow antiseptic and everyone watching, poking, laughing.
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His mom's older sister used to go to consciousness-raising groups when his mom was a teenager, and they'd do things like look at their own genitals in the mirror to get a feel for their womanhood. Oz doesn't want to look at himself like that, doesn't want to revisit the pages he made; he's read the pages Giles wrote over and over, so he's memorized the sequence, starts hearing Auden as he finishes the excerpt from Midsummer-Night's Dream. But he skips past his own pages, every time ( ... )
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Questions ought to be life-lines, the rope tossed at the last minute, hauling you to safety. They never have been, not for Oz. Giles asked him once before if Oz loved Willow. Love a lot of people, he said; still in love with you, he didn't manage to get out. Questions wrap around his throat and clog his mouth ( ... )
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Oz can't see anything beyond the seam of Giles' sweater and a patch of skin on his throat, but he is still here, one little room that feels just the same as the one in Sunnydale, and it's an everywhere.
"Love you," Oz says softly. Everywhere is a place, worlds-big, that jolts and rumbles, like Giles' irregular breath and the grinding sound of his voice.
"Of course it matters. Hurt you so much." Oz digs his hand between Giles' side and the cushion, working and weaselling it deeper until his arm is wrapped as tightly around Giles as Giles' arms are around him. He tried so hard to be normal and human and right, and all he succeeded in doing was killing Veruca and nearly killing Giles and breaking Willow. He's nowhere now, broken and scattered, and he clenches his fist around a fold in the sweater.
"Want to stay -" Oz wriggles back a little, trying to see Giles' face. Brine drying to rocky salt on the back of his tongue and winds whipping through his chest. "Can't
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